The silence on that single question told her more than any of Margery’s paragraphs, and she stopped waiting for an answer that was never going to come.

She read Margery’s last message twice, standing in the kitchen where so much of the disappearing had happened, and she noticed that even now, even at the very end, the letters were entirely about the Strouds — about Crispin’s future, the family’s standing, the reputation that needed guarding.

It was a remarkable thing, when she looked at it plainly: a woman who had known her for eight years, writing to beg her to reconsider, and unable even in the begging to spend a single sentence on what those eight years had taken from Lenore herself.

The invisibility had been that total.

It was not that Margery had weighed Lenore’s losses and found them unimportant.

It was that Lenore’s losses had never once entered Margery’s mind as a category that existed.